Follow Us!

NVIDIA F2P Bundle (2014) Review

Warface:

Warface is an FPS developed by Crytek with its famous CRYENGINE, so you can expect it to look good, and it does. It does not look great, with soft details on faces and textures that look a little upscaled, but the graphics are still quite good and the performance was excellent for me. It did stutter a little, taking the framerate down from 60, but that could have been due to brief lag spikes.

The gameplay of Warface is very action focused, as the co-op matches start off with you and others being dropped off from a helicopter. Before touching down though, the windows open up allowing enemies to shoot at you, and naturally for you to shoot back. As the level continues, you advance forward with enemies popping out from buildings, coming around corners, and appearing behind you, always with something to shoot you. To survive you will have to keep your eyes and ears open, and try not to become too separated from your team.

The game features four different classes, which fill the standard roles of assault, sniper, medic and engineer. Assault and sniper are available from the beginning, and personally I have stuck with the assault class. I did play some sniper in the tutorial mission, but have always found that my sniping skills in a single player game do not translate well to a multiplayer game. The assault class was fun to play as, running down streets and through buildings, picking up and eliminating targets on the way. You do have a limited amount of ammo, but the assault class has the ability to restock it for you and your enemies.

Successfully completing a mission gives you experience based on your performance. Obviously this experience will give you some stature amongst other players, but it also appears to be necessary to unlock certain things, including gear and the other two classes. Co-op missions are unlocked by completing previous co-op missions. Versus is always available to play and, somehow, in my first match I actually came in second on my team. (That is unusual for me in an FPS.) It was fun, but there were some deaths that I did not like much. Specifically those where it appeared my killer was shooting through a wall or corner. Now this could either be because you can shoot through these objects, or it could be that the placement of where the bullets spawn and the placement of the character model do not fully agree when viewed by another player.

All in all, a fun game that can satisfy an itch for some quick, gunfire-fueled action. It handles as you expect of any online FPS, which makes it easy for almost any gamer to just jump in and get to it. Although the matchmaking system could be better by providing information such as how many players are required to start, and having it start based on a countdown, instead of the first person in the lobby having to press a button. Also it would be nice if the versus lobby did not constantly un-ready me whenever something changed. I must have readied myself five times because the teams were being shuffled/balanced, someone was changing their class, a butterfly flapped its wings, etc.

Is it pay-to-win though? That is a little hard to say. There are weapons and gear that can be purchased with in-game or premium currency, but how much does that matter in the co-op missions? I suspect that success in those missions is going to be more influenced by skill and teammates than equipment, though I have not been able to get into the later ones yet. My guess is that no one else is playing those missions.

In the versus matches though, I could see someone who spent real money getting an advantage as there are better weapons and body armor. Of course you can earn the in-game currency to purchase these, but it looks like that will take a long time to get the best stuff. How long, I am not sure. So for the co-op, I cannot say if this is pay-to-win, and for versus I can see it making an impact. How large an impact I cannot predict without actually testing the equipment, and I am not able to do that.